Sad to say, based on the result, I should probably be heading back to middle school with Tucker (my 6th grade son) to get a refresher in Mr. Mead’s class.

But here is the thing: not only did I get the majority of the questions wrong, the vast majority of the questions asked me to do things I have never had to do in real life. I’ve never had to figure out the lateral surface area of a cone, nor been asked to give the mode of a series of numbers, nor had to figure out a square root. At least not that I can remember. If I ever did know how to do any of that stuff, and I probably did since I passed the test at some point long ago, it’s now long gone from my memory banks. Somehow, I’ve survived.

Yong Zhao recently linked to an article from a few years ago that indicates that kids in Wisconsin are spending somewhere around 3 million hours taking standardized tests, and that doesn’t include “time spent distributing and collecting materials, taking practice tests, giving instructions, and addressing other logistics of testing.” And I wonder, how much of that time is being spent on stuff that kids are going to forget? And then I wonder how much kids could really learn if they spent that time immersed in the stuff that they want to learn rather than what we want them to?

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t make sure every child can read and write and do basic math and have a fundamental understanding of history and science and the rest. We should provide every child with the skills and literacies he or she needs to understand the world and continue to learn. And I know that if we are to help kids find their own passions for learning that we need to expose them to many different things, especially when they are young.

But I have to ask, does every child have to pass the same test by the end of 10th grade? Really? Does every child have to read Voltaire and Turgenev and Amy Tan as the Common Core suggests? Our friend Karl Fisch admirably asked this same type of question last fall:

And therein lies the dilemma – is it possible to provide in a systemic way a customized educational experience for all students that both allows and encourages them to pursue their passions, but also exposes them to the wide range of human endeavors that they may have little or no knowledge about and therefore wouldn’t be able to even know if they were passionate about in the first place?

They key word there is obviously “systemic” because we do want every child to have the foundation to continue to learn about whatever he or she wants or needs to learn. But, like Karl, I’m not at all sure that’s even possible. For one thing, there is a real disconnect between what “learning” is and the all-purpose goal of “higher student achievement;” I would argue the two are almost totally unrelated in today’s heightened political rhetoric around schools. And for another, real learning for the most part requires real contexts, not the contrived experiences that schools in general can offer.

To that end, the Common Core doesn’t help. The real impetus for the Common Core has nothing to do with learning in the contexts that we talk about it. Nothing to do with exploration, experience, reflection, creation, sharing, collaboration, or changing the world. Instead, it has everything to do with creating a new “Easy Button” for education, one that will let us compare our kids even more. In a world where we can personalize and individualize in ways like never before, we’ll give students an even more “common” educational experience. That saddens me.

The crux of all of this is that it’s just too hard to do it any other way. It’s too hard to let kids make decisions around their own learning (even though they’re doing it all the time at home) because we won’t be able to track it easily. It’s too hard to let them read books that fuel their passions because we can’t read all those books to see if they are “appropriate” or “effective” or whatever else. And we can’t let kids go really deeply into the things they’re interested in because goodness knows we have too much stuff to cover in the curriculum that they need to pass the test to make that work.

And while I’m sure that there will be some great, inquiry-based, choice-based curriculum that will be developed around the Common Core that will make even me happy, I fear that in general, we just don’t want to work that hard. We’ll go running to those textbook publishers and “approved providers” (who are no doubt salivating at the prospect) who will help us get our students to meet the standards but, in the end, do nothing to expand the opportunities for kids to learn things in ways they will never, ever forget.

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Will Richardson

5 Comments

Matt Cronin
on March 15, 2011 at 12:20 am

The gnashing of teeth over the Common Core seems a bit hyperbolic to me. It creates a straw man where we can spend countless hours arguing over what we should teach. For me the real meat of the discussion should focus around how you teach (and students learn) that content. Any piece of knowledge that helps us understand our world, including the surface area of cones, is fair game in my book. I can easily list knowledge and skills I’ve acquired that serve no immediate application. I’ve also learned skills that had immediate application, but no real lasting value. There needs to be a balance between choice and teacher-direction. The most masterful teachers can engage students in the driest of mathematics. The worst teachers can suck the life out of the most captivating moments in history. The best teachers reveal a world that is waiting to be understood.

focusing on this Will:
The crux of all of this is that it’s just too hard to do it any other way. It’s too hard to let kids make decisions around their own learning (even though they’re doing it all the time at home) because we won’t be able to track it easily. It’s too hard to let them read books that fuel their passions because we can’t read all those books to see if they are “appropriate” or “effective” or whatever else. And we can’t let kids go really deeply into the things they’re interested in because goodness knows we have too much stuff to cover in the curriculum that they need to pass the test to make that work.

i don’t think it’s too hard to do it the other way. i think it’s too hard for us to give up the control we’re so used to.
who says we need to track? who says we need to read everything kids read? and for goodness sake, who says we need to cover a curriculum?
kids may look ridiculous or frivolous to us as they connect to others every moment they can. but – who says that’s not what we should be paying attention to? how they connect.

Shirky writes:
What the open source movement teaches us is that the communal can be at least as durable as the commercial. For any given piece of software, the question “Do the people who like it take care of each other?” turns out to be a better predictor of success than “What’s the business model?”

i think that’s fitting here.
let’s give up the business model. and true – that will be hard. but once we get the hang of it, once we start letting how people who come together take care of each other be our predictor, we’ll wonder why we waited so long.
how can see a better way, the natural way we learn, ie: in our homes, and after we graduate, etc, and not go there now.
the web is primed for us. it’s waiting for us to connect. and take care of each other.

In reading Seth Godin’s “Are You Doing a Good Job?”, I came across the following:
You might very well be doing a good job. But that doesn’t mean you’re a linchpin, the one we’ll miss. For that, you have to stop thinking about the job and start thinking about your platform, your point of view and your mission.

In response to Will’s question, I think it needs to start with building and district administration leading the way forward to change the culture of their communities. It’s super-hard work, but the only way I see it happening with staff engagement.

i say we start working both in and out of the system. if each district/city/whatever has a free space (think 20% google time) for people to experiment, self-construct their own structures, no questions asked, we end up with people in the system saying, oh – i can do that.
until we get to the point where those labs/free spaces become a part of each individual in the district. (think how we keep saying tech should be invisible, well innovation should be invisible, it’s learning really)
this can’t be a sell or a push, it’s got to be a pull, an attraction, per choice. that makes for a slow start. but exponential gains will blow us away. soon. whether the system joins in or not.

and are there really no proven alternatives? i think they’re all around us. we just haven’t let ourselves redefine what we’re trying to prove.

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